In the past, the U.S. ranked second in the world in the percentage of adults with postsecondary vocational or academic education. Today, the U.S. has slipped to fifth position.

South Korea leads the world: nearly 70 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds are college educated. Only 46 percent of young U.S. workers have earned a certificate or degree.

The U.S. is not on track to meet President Obama’s goal of leading the world in college-educated workers by 2020. College graduation rates are falling. according to a new report. Among students who started college in 2009, the year Obama launched his college campaign, only 53 percent had graduated in six years.

More than 70 percent of young children attend preschool in OECD countries, compared to 41 percent of U.S. 3-year-olds and 66 percent of 4-year-olds. “It’s an area where the U.S. trails quite a bit behind,” said Schleicher.

When U.S. students post mediocre scores on international tests, poverty is “the elephant in the room,” says American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. Others point to a “poverty crisis” rather than an “education crisis.”

Overall, the U.S. rates 28th in math proficiency for advantaged students among the 34 countries in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA). Disadvantaged U.S. students rank 20th compared to similar students in other PISA countries.

Our advantaged students may do better than poor kids here, but they don’t outperform similar students in developed countries.

While income inequality is high in the U.S., absolute poverty is not especially high, Petrilli and Wright argue. Including all forms of income, including welfare benefits, the U.S. poverty rate is lower than Britain’s, the same as Germany’s and “barely higher than Finland’s.”

Poverty drags down performance here — and everywhere, they conclude. The U.S. is not an outlier.

Socioeconomic disadvantage — such as few books in the home — explains some of the gap in scores, according to a report by three economists. “Once we adjust for social status, we are doing much better than we think,” Stanford’s Martin Carnoy told the New York Times.

“There is no way you can blame socioeconomic status for the performance of the United States,” countered Andreas Schleicher, who runs PISA for the OECD. “When you look at all dimensions of social background, the United States does not suffer a particular disadvantage.”

According to OECD’s disadvantage index, which includes “parental education and occupation, household wealth, educational resources at home and other measures of social and economic status,” less than 15 percent of U.S. students “come from the bottom rung of society,” reports the Times. “And yet, Mr. Schleicher found, 65 percent of principals in American schools say at least 30 percent of their students come from disadvantaged families, the most among nations participating in the PISA tests.”

The newly identified students “included many students with IQs significantly above the minimum eligibility threshold, implying that even relatively high-ability students from disadvantaged backgrounds were being overlooked under the traditional referral system,” according to researchers.

In Elk Grove, a Sacramento suburb, 3.5 percent of lower-income students (based on eligibility for a free lunch) are in gifted and advanced classes, compared to 11 percent of non-poor students. The district has spent “more than $860,000” to rethink procedures for identifying high-potential students.

Screening all third graders has nearly doubled the number identified as gifted.

The district’s Elitha Donner Elementary School, for example, identified 12 low-income students as gifted this year, up from only three last year, and narrowed the white-black gap in gifted education from 4-to-1 in favor of whites to 2.5-to-1 in the last year alone.

Next year, the district will roll out the rest of the changes to the identification system, with teachers and principals developing new rubrics for identifying exceptional creativity and leadership, both in class and in outside activities, such as community volunteering and church youth groups.

The experimental program will offer Pell aid to cover college tuition for 10,000 students.

Dual enrollment courses are expanding rapidly nationwide. Some states or school districts cover high school students’ college tuition and textbook costs, but others do not.

Pell Grants, which now cost more than $30 billion a year, should be require college readiness, argues Isabel Sawhill, a Brookings researcher.

Targeting college aid to those most likely to succeed should start with counseling in 9th grade or earlier on the courses, grades and test results needed to do well in college. Students who “achieved a basic level of proficiency” would receive more generous support than the current Pell maximum. Low performers would not get college aid, but could receive “support for other training or education programs.”

More than half of the top-performing schools serving low-income students in California are charters, according to an Education Trust-West analysis.

Seven charters were among the top 10 schools based on eighth-grade student math scores. Five of 10 top schools were charters in third grade and 11th grade English language arts performance. Nine percent of schools statewide are charters.

America’s Finest Charter School students hike in Silverwood Wildlife Sanctuary on an after-school field trip.

Overall, 44 percent of California students met or exceeded standards in English language arts, 34 percent in math.

Achievement gaps between racial/ethnic subgroups “can’t be explained away by poverty,” concludes Ed Trust-West. “Low-income White students perform about as well as Black students who are not low income.” Low-income Asian students perform far better than Latinos and blacks from middle-income or higher families.

Education Trust-West analyzed data from schools where at least 60 percent of the students come from low-income families, notes Cabinet Report.

At the top of the list for schools finding success in English language arts instruction was America’s Finest Charter in San Diego, where 77 percent of third graders – among a school population that is 95 percent low-income – met or exceeded the standards on statewide tests.

American Indian Public Charter in Alameda, with an 81 percent low-income student population, was the top-performing school in math with 75 percent of its eighth-graders meeting or exceeding expectations.

Downtown Business High, a Los Angeles Unified magnet school, topped the list for 11th grade English scores. About 83 percent of students are low-income.

“Schools like these dispel the damaging myth that schools can do very little to help students overcome the barriers of poverty,” report writers noted.

Fifty-one percent of Pell Grant recipients earn a college degree, compared to 65 percent for non-Pell students, according to the Education Trust’s new report.

However, the average graduation gap at each college is only 5.7 percent. That’s because many Pell recipients, who come from low- and moderate-income families, enroll at schools with below-average graduation rates.

Two schools in the State University of New York system, for example—SUNY College at Oswego and SUNY College at Brockport—both have similar enrollments, median SAT scores and Pell recipient enrollment rates. But Pell students at Oswego had a graduation rate of 66 percent, compared to 48 percent at Brockport.

While 22 percent of institutions had no gap between Pell and non-Pell students, 20 percent had a gap of at least 12 percentage points.

He joined an interracial fraternity and made friends with other first-generation students, who also were struggling academically. An adviser tried to help. But going from a small, supportive, all-minority high school to a huge Midwestern university was too much.

“I went in with everyone having these titanical expectations, not to mention a full-ride scholarship. And I’m just like, ‘I don’t know if I can do that, I don’t know, that’s a lot,’” he says.

. . . At the time, his mother had moved out of the homeless shelter and into subsidized housing, but was still struggling.

“Honestly when I was here, my main concern was ‘Is mom going to be OK? Does mom have the money to pay the bills this month? Is she going to go without hot water? Is she going to get evicted?’ That was my worry every day,” he says.

“It’s not uncommon to have students who have had some family trauma that they’ve not dealt with, fall into a depression and stop attending classes,” Monica Gray , programs director for the College Success Foundation, tells Cardoza.

The foundation sends low-income, first-generation students in groups of 10 to colleges all over the country. Ninety percent earn a degree.

Diana Sanchez and Bernice Hodge, who grew up in Washington, D.C., go to the University of Wisconsin-Madison on full scholarships. Because they’re Posse scholars, they meet with a tenured faculty member weekly for the first two years. They must ask each of their professors to fill out mid-semester evaluations.

“Also, sometimes you question yourself. These kids might be smarter than me; I don’t see anyone else scrunching up their face. So sometimes it’s also sort of like a pride thing. I don’t want the professor to think that I don’t get it,” Diana adds.

Bernice had a 4.2 grade point average in high school, but professors said her writing wasn’t up to par. “And I just remember thinking back to high school. Why didn’t anybody catch these mistakes or why didn’t anybody correct me before I got to college?”

Diana’s classmates have traveled to places she’s only read about, she says.

“I’m taking a political science intro to Africa. And I only know the information that I’m learning in the class, but these people, they either had a specialized course in high school or they went to Zimbabwe.”

In her freshman year, her mother, who doesn’t speak English, fell ill, says Diana. “She actually was crying in the voicemail and was like ‘I’m lost, I don’t know where I am right now, come home. I miss you.’”

When her mother fell into a coma last semester, Posse staffers talked to her professors, who let her catch up on assignments while she was home. Diana is now back at UW.

“During much of high school, he and his mother were homeless and living in a shelter,” yet he earned high grades, “won every academic award imaginable and received a full-ride, four-year scholarship” to Michigan State’s hospitality business program.

At Michigan State, Feaster was shocked to receive C’s instead of the A’s or B’s he expected. He stopped turning in homework and spent most of his time in his room.

His high school principals, Michael Cucciardo and Tiffany Godbout-Williams, flew out to Michigan — spending their own money — to talk to him.

Christopher told them about his poor grades, how much he worried about his mother, and his fears of not belonging.

. . . They stayed for two days, met Christopher’s professors, sat in on his classes and set up a plan for him — all the structures they had used to help him be successful in high school.

. . . But Christopher slid even further into depression and stopped answering texts or phone calls. He felt he had disappointed everyone.

He failed all his final exams and was told not to return.

Feaster now works at a restaurant as a host and lives with his mother in subsidized housing.

Was it too much support in high school, inflated grades or depression? (Feaster’s mother, who dropped out of college after one year, when she became pregnant with him, suffers from depression.)

Only one out of every four low-income students that attend college will earn a degree, according to the Pell Institute for Opportunity in Higher Education.

“Traditional schools in Washington, D.C., tried out home visits after privately run charter schools used them to successfully engage parents, he writes. Now the National Education Association is encouraging more schools to try home visits.

Hobgood Elementary teacher Ashlee Barnes introduces herself to one of her new fourth-grade students at a Murfreesboro apartment complex. Photo: Blake Farmer, WPLN

Ninety percent of students at Hobgood Elementary in Murfreesboro, Tenn., come from low-income households., while most of the teachers were raised in middle-class families.

“Once a year, just before school starts, they board a pair of yellow buses and head for the neighborhoods and apartment complexes where Hobgood students live,” writes Farmer.

Principal Tammy Garrett wants teachers to meet their students’ parents and see their challenges. “If a kid doesn’t have a place to sleep or they have to share the couch with their siblings at night and there are nine kids with one bedroom or two bedrooms, it’s important for them to see that — not to be sympathetic,” she says. “It’s to empower the teachers to change the lives of the kids.”